Identification of the Relationship between Operating Conditions and Polymer Qualities in a Continuous Polymerization Reactor

A mathematical model is developed to describe the relationship between the manipulated variables (e.g. jacket inlet temperature and feed flow rate) and the important qualities (e.g conversion and weight average molecular weight (Mw)) in a continuous polymerization reactor. The subspace-based identification method for Wiener model is used to retrieve from the discrete sample data the accurate information about both the structure and initial parameter estimates for iterative parameter optimization methods. The comparison of the output of the identified Wiener model with the outputs of a non-linear plant model shows a fairly satisfactory degree of accordance.